Azerbaijan. I’m going to be complete honest and say that I really didn’t like this country. It was crazy hot, the cops were dicks, and the famed city of Baku felt a little fake to me. On the positive side, I got to meet back up with Melek. An Azerbaijani I had met while in Istanbul. Life is much better when you get the chance to hang out with a local! We went to a few local joints with her friends and all around had a great time!

But beyond that, I was in the country for 4 days and seriously paid the cops more money than I spent during my visit! I’m not going to say I was abiding by all the traffic laws 100% of the time BUT STILL! Every time I got pulled over they wanted a $50 bill. And it’s kind of hard to deny you were doing anything wrong when they have traffic cameras EVERYWHERE! They would bring my into a big room with a bunch of TV screens and rewind the tape to show me speeding or passing in a no passing zone or some other BS. It would be ok if I was in that room with the 100 other people that were doing it too, but no, they would always just pull me over.